YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Ford

lines on the record: 68
first: 2021-07-22
most recent: 2021-07-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“360 employees spread across 14 offices throughout the world, all looking at high growth companies across different sectors, different markets. Take me inside one of your investment committee meetings. I've always been amazed at how you can look at everything and then still kind of maintain an incredibly high bar for what makes a GA investment versus what doesn't, even though it's spread across all these different factors.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we're seeing a lot of good things happening in Indonesia, and we made our first investment in Vietnam this year. We have a deal we're looking at in the Philippines, what connects them all together is they're all digital businesses and they're typically digital disruptors. We've tapped into that idea pretty much everywhere digital innovators, digital disruptors are really a great way for us to invest in emerging markets.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's moved India from one of the most expensive providers of wireless internet to consumers to the second cheapest in the world. And so suddenly of 400 million people connected to the internet, in many cases for the first time. And that's creating a platform for tremendous innovation of new digital business models. And we have a few great companies, one education space by Juice that's really taking advantage of that ubiquitous platform. So I'm excited about India and what we're doing there. Latin America, we've been able to tap into entrepreneurship in Brazil and Mexico for a long time. And it's been wonderful to see those countries develop so well. They're volatile places in some ways to do business, but also with tremendous upside. And then most recently Southeast Asia, which is a people forget the scale of the nine countries in Southeast Asia is pretty large. And as an economy and a population.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Career has pivoted from being an economy driven by state owned enterprises and the public sector, if you will, to private entrepreneurship and the private sector becoming the driving force of the economy and the people doing that have been private sector business builders, entrepreneurs, and we've been able to capitalize on that. I see their innovation cycle only getting stronger. What they've done in technologies well known with companies like Alibaba and ByteDance, but now in life sciences, they're actually becoming a real innovator in the life sciences space. We have a very positive view towards the opportunity there. India, we've been in India since 2001, and we've done lots of things there. We've done financial services investing. We invested in the IT services industry or business process outsourcing industry with good success. But the thing that's happening right now in India that's super exciting is we're seeing the emergence of digital India. And we have an investment in a company there called GEO, which is the largest provider of internet access.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at where venture capital is being invested, where unicorns are being created, where great entrepreneurs are. It's global. It's in the US. It's in Europe. It's in Israel. It's in Asia. It's now Southeast Asia. It's in Latin America. And it really was us following those innovators and those entrepreneurs around the world. And there's, well, these countries all have very different risk profiles that need to be understood in very different ways of doing business. There's this common thread that entrepreneurs look very much the same no matter where they come from. They're trying to create a new market, introduce a new product, building, disrupting something that exists or meeting a need that hasn't been met before. That's happening in all those places. So if you drill into it a little bit, China has been an incredibly important geography for us. It's almost 20% of our portfolio. We've got offices in Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong. This is a country that over”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think one of the most exciting parts of my journey at General Atlantic and in our 41 year history as an investment firm has been the globalization of our business. And then we started, we were one geography, one sector, and even a subsector we were doing just software in the US. And what we really did was follow the industry and follow entrepreneurs as the industry globalized and first Europe, then Asia, then Latin America, and built our businesses there. But it was really about following innovation, following entrepreneurs coming up to today about half of our business is now outside the US, about a third in emerging markets. So we've been pioneering the idea of growth equity in emerging markets. It's been an important part of our success and our future. But as I go around the world, the main theme, entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon now. And when I started, it was basically Silicon Valley and Route 128 in Boston and maybe a little bit outside the US, but not much. And now if you look at it.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me fantastic. That sounds like most folks have a lot more stops on the way to promised land, but you found that relatively early in your career, which is really fantastic. So we just maybe pivot to General Atlantic itself. You guys have offices in every major geography around the globe. Take us around the world in 80 seconds if you can to discuss the current opportunities”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And my longtime partner and friend. And we got to talking, and this is about four years into my time at Morgan Stanley. And he said, well, have you ever thought about joining an investment firm? And I thought back to my early days at Morgan Stanley and said, this is pretty exciting. It's really where I want to go. Now, I was 30 years old. I kind of wonder what was I thinking? I was doing well at Morgan Stanley. I'm with this great firm. I have a nice career ahead of me. And I jumped to a firm that no one had heard of with 10 people. But it was the best decision ever made because, you know, like I would say to any young person, follow your dreams because it's what I really wanted to do. And I had a lot of learning to do to figure out how to become an investor. But that's why I arrived here. And then I've had Steve Denning I mentioned, but I have another colleague, Dave Hodgson, who's our vice chairman. And I can only say how amazing it's been to have a professional relationship of that duration with two amazing people, both Stanford Business School graduates, by the way, but it's been a fabulous period.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it stayed in the back of my mind. And Morgan Stanley had a wonderful history. We had been the underwriter for the Apple IPO in 1980. So when I joined first Captain Marcus and then the tech group, there was such excitement about what was going on in technology. So then I was fortunate like yourself to have gone to Stanford Business School. I followed my dream to go to Silicon Valley and be out west and then returned to Morgan Stanley doing tech banking. And one of my clients was General Atlantic. And General Atlantic at the time was a very small firm with probably less than 100 million dollars of capital under management and maybe 10 professionals, actually probably less than 10 professionals. They were already a leader in software investing and had made a number of investments in old companies like goal systems, merino associates, and CompuWare. And then I was the banker who was working on their IPOs and M&A events. And through that, I got to know one of the founders of the firm, Steve Denning, who was now our chairman of the Mayor.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's an interesting story. So many things in life are about serendipity and where the road takes you. And I remember coming out of Amherst College and I was fortunate enough to secure an analyst position at Morgan Stanley. And for some reason, they decided to initially place me in the capital markets group on the syndicate desk. And one of the responsibilities we had there was to focus on our IPO activity. And all of a sudden, I was exposed to all these exciting high-tech IPOs out of Silicon Valley. And I have to be honest, I never ventured west of Pennsylvania during my lifetime before I joined Morgan Stanley. And it really exposed me to venture capital, entrepreneurship, innovation in ways that I had never seen before. And with several trips to Silicon Valley. And I think at that moment in time, I said, boy, at some point in my life, if I could be involved in the investing business like these great venture capitalist buildings exciting firms, I'd like to do that. And the time wasn't.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to welcome Bill Ford. Tom, thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here today. And I think I'll say that introduction for my mother for another time, but very kind. But again, I'm delighted to be here and reconnect with a longtime friend and colleague. Fantastic. Well, let's jump right into it, Bill, if you don't mind. How did you first become interested in private equity investing? You've been doing it for the bulk of your career. And then how did you get to GA?”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thesis going in that that's a strong culture and that there's a solid process for making decisions, and you really see it at work when everybody is saying the same thing. And that's particularly intriguing. And then when you ask about, well, how do you ask them the same questions you ask Bill, which is how do you think about what's going to go to committee and what's going to meet the bar, how they borrow time and attention from all of their colleagues globally to make sure whoever's got an expertise in something, the sun never sets on the GA Empire in a sense. They will find the right resources, the right expertise, and bring it to bear. That's really difficult in a global organization. And I think it only works well if you start with that culture. And Bill touched on that in our talk.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the great things about it is unfettered access during the GA process. You can really ask to speak with anybody. And so it's somewhat kind of a random walk. We're not trying to say, okay, let's just dig in deep on any one sector. Let's pick the head of consumer. Let's pick a more mid-level professional in the financial services group. Let's pick somebody out of India. And from there, we don't need to do 50 calls. Sue Carter at Common Fund Capital taught me once upon a time that my handful of really high performing quality reference calls is way better than doing 50 surface level co-home type calls. So if you just pick your calls and just go, you'll start to see common threads come out. And this is not with every organization, but with GA, you could see the culture coming through. You could see the respect for each individual. And everybody, when you talk about their process, how do you guys look at things? How do you source your deal flow? How do you work through your process at GA? Everybody is speaking from the same hymnal.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So when you go through your due diligence underwriting How do you think differently about the homework that you'll do in a, call it more decentralized organization than something where if you have one singular leader of the team that's really driving it, you feel like you're underwriting that person”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Organization and their transition this year from Bill being CEO to also kind of being chair and then adding a lot of co-CEOs and CIOs, it seemed like semantics kind of effortless because they kind of have been running the organization that way anyway for a long time to have the next layer of leadership really step up. So that was particularly intriguing to kind of see that happen first time when I did my diligence.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always kind of thought rightly or wrongly that GA was more of like a technology firm. And that was clearly where their roots were, primarily in software. But I never really knew much about the consumer piece or the financial services piece. And now the healthcare piece. So they are multi-industry sector. They can do everything from seed to early stage venturish type deals all the way to large cap global buyout across the world. And so one of the things I wanted to touch on during my discussion with Bill was how do you put everything on one common bar to say that looking at an early stage software investment in India, how does that compete with a rust belt industrial company in Pittsburgh as an example? The only way they can really do it is by delegating. So they do have the investment committee that looks at everything, but before it even gets to the investment committee, it has to bubble its way up through multiple layers of leadership in the”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if we needed his support on something in particular, it might be a little bit sticky, he would weigh in early and kind of set the tone. And other times he wouldn't weigh in. He'd kind of wait to make sure everybody else had a chance to talk first before giving his own view. That really is an art to do that well and to make sure everybody feels a sense of ownership because on these committees, as you know, Ted, you've sat on a bunch of these. You've been around enough to know which ones function really well and are high performing and which ones kind of stumble a little bit.”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Having worked with Bill so long at Rockefeller for just about 10 years, the personality, what you see is what you get. So Bill does not act differently in our committee meetings as he does with an LP, as he does on the other myriad of nonprofits that he serves on. He is the same. And he is one of the best chairs of any committee that I've ever been with. He does an excellent job of facilitating conversation and making sure everybody participates. He'll do the Socratic method and we'll call people out if they're not participating in a very non-threatening way. But if he knows that somebody has a particular area of expertise in an asset class or a manager or a geography, he'll say, hey, blankety blank, feel free to weigh in or when you had your experiences with this group, what'd you think? And just really facilitates a conversation. And at the same time, as a CIO or a deputy CIO, if you needed his support on something,”
2021-07-22 · Capital Allocators · Bill Ford – General Atlantic (Manager Meetings, EP.03) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source